Valuing the Literate Skills and Knowledge of Academic Outsiders: A Retrospective on Two Basic Writing Case Studies

Deborah Mutnick and Shannon Carter

In this retrospective, we
reflect on the reciprocity and wider, political implications of our
separate, yet related, early research on basic writing (BW) in light
of our close collaboration on a more recent project, Writing
Democracy. Inspired, in part, by BW retrospectives by Sondra
Perl and Kevin Roozen, which appeared in this journal in 2013 and
2014, respectively, we hope readers will consider the current piece
as part of an ongoing conversation. For our part, we
return to case studies featured in our earlier work for lessons to be
drawn about research methods, the discipline, and the political
exigencies that threaten not only BW’s future but also masses
of students—working class, nonwhite, first generation, and other
academic outsiders—whose educational, professional, and personal
prospects have dimmed in a neoliberal era of austerity. The two case
studies are:

“Joe” in Deborah Mutnick’s Writing in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in Higher Education (Heinemann, 1996)

Though
we met on the Executive Board of the Council on Basic Writing (CBW)
and continue to be interested in the politics of literacy and related
theories and practices, our research agendas have turned to community
literacy studies and public writing. In what follows, we consider the
circumstances of these original BW case studies—not only as authors
(and the conditions that influenced our choices as researchers and
writers) but also as each other’s readers. Shannon discovered
Deborah’s work in graduate school, which opened up new
possibilities for her. Deborah encountered Shannon’s work around
the time they served together on the CBW Executive Board. Here
we reflect on our earlier research in conversation with others in the
field and, most directly, with one another. We explore how our
ideas have changed since the publications of these studies in 1996
and 2008, especially with respect to the ongoing material, political,
ideological, and institutional challenges faced by basic writers
represented in some of our field’s most influential studies. We
still need “time to know them,” as Marilyn Sternglass so clearly
demonstrated in 1997, and we hope to make that argument again through
the lenses of our retrospective examination of our own and
each other’s research on basic writing in a period of even greater
threat to equal access to higher education.

We
begin by reflecting on the subjects of our case studies: Joe Baxter
(in Deborah’s study) and Eric Carter (in Shannon’s study). We
recall what led us to approach our research questions through case
studies as well as the particular paths that led us respectively to
Joe and Eric. We consider our relationship as teachers and
researchers with them at the time, and then turn to our connection
with them today. Finally, we consider what these case studies might
have to teach us about basic writing today, what we might now do
differently as researchers, and how our current research agendas both
depart from and circle back to the problems of literacy instruction.

Case Studies: Then

Deborah on Joe

I set out in my study to illuminate the experience of basic writers
through interviews with students and their teachers, including close,
meta-reflective readings by each participant of the students’
writing. One of the students, Joe Baxter, gave me the title of what
began as my dissertation and became a book, Writing
in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in
Higher Education. A
tall, heavyset African American man in his early twenties, Joe
invokes the phrase “alien world” at the beginning of his essay,
Blacks in Science Fiction: Why Are We Invisible? written for a
BW class at one of the university’s extension campuses in East New
York, a neighborhood in which half the residents live below the
poverty line. A science fiction fan and writer, Joe had been raised
on Star Trek
and had read Octavia Butler and Sam Delaney among other sci-fi
writers; he was also, impressively, working on two books of his own,
one about a multicultural crew that lands on a planet still gripped
by segregation and another, Cyberfighter, about
the depletion of the ozone layer. In his essay, he writes: “Picture
an alien world. A sleek craft touches down on the forbidding surface.
A hatch opens and a small group of people exit the vehicle, they
check the atmosphere with strange instruments. The air is fit for
them to breathe so they remove their helmets. All the people are
human and all are caucasian.” He emphasizes that, “[M]any
novelists only view caucasion-s making the leap into space or across
time and alternate realitie-s.”{1}

Joe
concludes that paper with a trenchant statement of the consequences
of this scenario of the future and the responsibility writers bear in
constructing it: “Until other writers share the same vision of
Roddenberry and Butler that all races of humans can be explorers of
time and space and are capable of dealing with the unknown, blacks
and other ethnic groups will be invisible in science-fiction.”
Throughout the interview, I could see how this alien, white world,
which Joe further describes as assigning black people to subservient
roles or killing them off, mirrored the social realities he
experienced in his family, community, and school. It was his
metaphors of alienation and exploration that supported and deepened
my analysis of the impact of exclusionary, racist social practices
and policies on the historical-material and subjective conditions of
learning how to write. Even though Joe had been placed in a BW class,
he was in many ways the exception to the rule; his friends joined him
in verbal jousting like the dozens, but they were mostly “on the
basketball court” while Joe was “sitting on the bench watching
everybody’s coats, reading a book.”

When he does convince his friend Peanut to read Stephen King novels to the
extent that “…he couldn’t put books down,” Joe wishes
“[Peanut] had stayed more into—you know, I tried to pull him in
but, like I said….” He cannot complete the thought of what he
wanted to pull him into—reading, presumably, a world of ideas and
the agency Joe derived from the written word as opposed to the alien,
oppressive, white world—informing me that Peanut “…got shot, no
fault of his own…he was always around this guy (a drug dealer)
trying to make money…and the guy walked up to him and just shot
everybody there.” As a white, female, middle class researcher, I
knew this world primarily through news reports, novels, stories, and
films; through Joe—whose capacity to stand outside and reflect on
his world enabled him to escape some of its harshest consequences, at
least at that time, and report on them—I got a sense, however
limited, of the socioeconomic realities of growing up black and poor
in Brooklyn in the late twentieth century.

Shannon on Eric

Like
Joe inspired Deborah’s study, Eric inspired mine. Unlike Deborah’s
experience, however, my own inspiration predated Eric’s role as a
case study in The Way Literacy Lives by
more than three decades. As his older sister by two years, I have
witnessed firsthand the damage inaccurate and inappropriate literacy
measures can have on an individual’s life. According to traditional
measures like standardized tests, Eric was a failure when it came to
writing. He dropped out of high school at 17 and enrolled almost
immediately in classes at the local community college. There,
according to the standardized tests used for placement, he was marked
a “basic writer” and enrolled in a BW course designed to teach
him how to write error-free prose in timed environments. That first
semester in college would be his last.

Yet Eric’s struggles in school belie the reality of his literacy
skills. Standardized testing and other in-school traditions
surrounding academic writing tended to render invisible his
increasingly nuanced and sophisticated out-of-school literacies from
computer programming and hardware to electronic music and video
games. My goal in The Way Literacy Lives
was to represent these vernacular literacies in the BW classroom.
However, it wasn’t until I encountered Joe in Deborah’s
Writing in an Alien World
that I began to understand how I might approach this objective.
Through a theoretical framework I began to call “rhetorical
dexterity,” I was able to juxtapose Eric’s struggles with
in-school writing with his sophisticated out-of-school literacies as
an accomplished musician and successful technology specialist.
Rhetorical dexterity, as I’ve defined it, is a “pedagogical
approach that develops in students the ability to effectively read,
understand, manipulate, and negotiate the cultural and linguistic
codes of a new community of practice based on a relatively accurate
assessment of another, more familiar one” (22). I began to
consider “points of contact” and “points of dissonance”
between Eric’s successful literacy experiences out-of-school and
those valued in traditional academic settings. I began to consider
ways I might help students in our BW classes resist what Brian Street
calls “autonomous” definitions of literacy (literacy “standards”)
and instead apply an “ideological” model of literacy like
“rhetorical dexterity”-–making extensive use of their own
out-of-school literacy experiences to negotiate those privileged in
academic settings.

Deborah on Methodology

When
I embarked on my dissertation research, I had just begun to direct a
writing program with a large, new, 12-credit, basic reading and
writing sequence modeled on the University of Pittsburgh program
described by Bartholomae and Petrosky in Facts,
Artifacts, and Counteracts.
I found in the subject of basic writing a confluence of my own
theoretical, pedagogical, and political interests in relation not
only to questions of “otherness” and profound social inequalities
but also to a desire to see things in their wholeness, their full
complexity. I was especially interested in how the multifaceted
dialogue among teachers and students, programs and expectations, and
individuals and socio-historical-linguistic structures, produced the
term “basic writing”—or any of its synonyms, “remedial,”
“bonehead,” developmental.” I did not feel that I had to
eliminate every trace of subjectivity
(Brodkey){2}
or start from the premise of political neutrality (Hutcheon) or
conform to quasi-scientific protocols. Rather I set out to construct
what I would now see as a loosely ethnographic narrative from case
studies, a kind of novelistic depiction of basic writers, their
writing, and their teachers that I could interpret like a literary
work, developing a critical analysis of what Bakhtin called the
“chronotope” in which “time … thickens, takes on flesh,
becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and
responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history” (119).

I
learned a lot on the fly. I had read several articles and books on
qualitative research (see, e.g., Bogdan and Biklen), and I met with
an NYU professor who taught a qualitative methods course. Though I
talked that one time with the professor, I never took her course, and
the study I designed and the methodology I used were both imaginative
and flawed. I asked BW teachers to circulate a call for participants
to their students. Five or six students responded; three ended up in
the dissertation and the book. Because I was interested in
perceptions, and wanted to focus on textual and contextual
analysis—inspired by the idea in composition studies of applying
the skills of literary criticism to close readings of student
writing—I invited both students and teachers to respond to more or
less the same series of “life history” questions and then to read
aloud three texts, chosen by the student, and comment (share their
inner thoughts) as they read.

When
I had finished all the interviews, I transcribed them, an incredibly
tedious but transformative experience of close listening. Then I read
and reread the transcripts in consecutive “passes”—a method I
had picked up from my one meeting with the qualitative research
professor—annotating them and discerning patterns and themes. While
I had to labor over the transcriptions in my fifth floor walkup
apartment at my computer, pressing the pedals of a rented
transcription machine, I could take my loose-leaf notebooks to 7A, a
café in the East Village that I haunted for months. Probably the
biggest lesson for me as a researcher was that it was only through
these multiple, layered readings—digging below the surface of the
interviews—that I was able to “see” specific patterns. As I
wrote in 1996, these patterns made clear that “each case study
encompassed a different set of pedagogical issues” (xxv), belying
supposedly empirical claims about the categorical “basic writer”
and supporting my conclusion that basic writing research that
challenged the stereotype had the potential “to generate ‘a
politics
of articulation’ that [could] validate[s] students as intellectual
agents and give[s] voice and visibility to their perceptions of the
world …” (xxvi). In other words, the multivocal dialogue I
extrapolated from the interviews suggested a complex, differentiated
portrait of so-called basic writers that explained their literacy
development in socio-historical and political terms while recognizing
their unique gifts, strengths, weaknesses, and most of all, their
potential.

Shannon on Methodology

My
study emerged largely from the circumstances of my life after
graduate school, at my first tenure-line position: Director of Basic
Writing and the Writing Center at Texas A&M-Commerce, a
mid-sized, Ph.D.-granting public university outside Dallas. The
program I inherited in 2001 was a progressive one, deeply
influenced—like Deborah’s—by the one at the University of
Pittsburgh described in Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts.
Indeed, the person most influential on our various writing programs,
including BW, Donna Dunbar-Odom, trained under Bartholomae in the
then still quite famous Pitt program. She brought this approach to
our entire writing program in 1993, around the time Deborah was most
deeply immersed in her research and I was beginning graduate school.

The Way Literacy Lives did
not begin as a “study” per se, nor even a scholarly manuscript.
In its earliest iteration, it was a textbook created for the BW
program I inherited—a rhetorical intervention of sorts into a very specific
set of circumstances. Called Talking Back, this
400-page “book” was designed to disrupt literacy myths that I
believed impeded a BW student’s ability to successfully navigate
academic writing. This interest in resistance would remain a driving
theme in my book as well, where I insist that “fostering in our
students an awareness of the ways in which an autonomous model
deconstructs itself when applied to real-life literacy contexts can
empower them to work against this system in ways critical theorists
advocate” (2). Informed by Bartholomae and Petrosky, the
myth-busting assignments blended analytical reading and writing,
inviting students to read difficult, scholarly texts in literacy
studies, like “Sponsors of Literacy” (Brandt) and The
Violence of Literacy
(Stuckey), and whole texts like George Orwell’s 1984.
Throughout the sequence, students were asked to consider the politics
of literacy and challenges to the persistence of the “literacy
myth” (Graff) in traditional, in-school writing contexts—especially
standardized tests.

In
writing this textbook, I had two audiences in mind. The first
audience was the students populating our BW courses. The second
audience was the dedicated teachers and tutors I supervised in the
Writing Center, the vast majority of whom had no previous training in
composition studies and were eager to help but often constrained by
traditional models of literacy education. This approach, one I would later
apply to our first-year writing program,{3}
was designed to challenge problematic assumptions about how writing
works. Yet as I began to seek a publisher to market the textbook
beyond our own BW program, I quickly learned it would be necessary to
step back and theorize my approach. By 2005, I had received much
encouragement from three textbook publishers, with two of them
sending it out for multiple review sessions. Still, I could not seem
to frame it in ways that made sense to the current marketplace. I
could not market this textbook as part of the now widespread “Writing
About Writing” movement, since there was no WAW movement at that
point, shortly before Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle would publish
their seminal article on the subject, “Teaching About Writing,
Righting Misconceptions” (CCC, 2007). Though inspired by
Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts,
it could not be effectively marketed as an alternative to their
popular textbook Ways of Reading.
In short, I needed to create a scholarly argument for the curricular
solution I attempted to enact through that textbook. As I explain,

The Way Literacy Lives
is based, in part on our basic writing program, which is designed
to help learners (1) recognize “other,” “vernacular,” or
“marginalized” literacies as valid so they can begin to (2)
draw from them as they learn what it means to write for college
audiences—audiences far less unified or predictable than the
literacy-as-universal-standard model allows. (16)

I
began to approach this project as a scholarly manuscript fueled, in
part, by the literacy narratives students had written in our BW
program in response to Talking Back.

The
study I wanted to conduct wasn’t exactly empirical, though many of
my models were. I wanted to build upon work like that of Sondra
Perl’s study (1979), which helped disrupt literacy myths. I wanted
to illuminate the richly literate lives of students populating our
basic writing classrooms. I wanted to reveal the specific, often
quite negative ways inaccurate literacy measures and models impact
real writers in their everyday lives. I wanted to illustrate the
extreme disconnect between what is expected of writers in their
everyday lives and how classrooms regularly represent literacy
standards. It would be a few years before Kevin Roozen would begin
publishing his fascinating case studies that compare in-school
literacy practices with out-of-school ones, so I could not yet look
to his work for a model. However, I did have Deborah’s
Writing in an Alien World
at my fingertips. Her approach, especially the multivocal dialogue
extrapolated from interviews, had a significant impact on my own
approach. Also of
primary importance to me were Deborah Brandt’s studies of mass
literacy, especially Literacy in American Lives
(2001), and Linda Adler-Kassner and Susanmarie Harrington’s
Basic Writing as a Political Act (2002).

The
bulk of my research came from a blend of student writing (in two
sequenced courses featuring their literacy experiences) and
interviews based primarily on Brandt’s literacy interview script
(see pages 208-210). Using that same script, I interviewed Eric, my
brother, over the phone and at his home in Austin, Texas, capturing
about 20 hours of data, uploaded to Dropbox.com, on a recorder he had
set up in his home music studio.{4}
The themes I wished to explore were already well established in
Brandt’s work, but the relationships between his in-school and
out-of-school literacies began to emerge after I transcribed, coded,
and reviewed a forth and fifth time for recurring themes. Like
Deborah, from this analysis—coding and expanding my notes to
identify recurring themes—I learned about the richly literate lives
our students lead out of school, even if this richness was often
rendered altogether invisible by standardized testing and other
measures of traditional literacy. Thus, I began to theorize ways that
Eric’s experiences as an electronic musician informed his academic
writing experiences. In Eric’s experiences, then, I found what I
would begin calling “rhetorical dexterity.”

Deborah on Theory

It
was Bakhtin’s theories of language as dialogic, multivocal, “…
heteroglot from top to bottom … represent[ing] the co-existence of
socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past …
between different socio-ideological groups in the present …”
(291) that most powerfully inspired me then. As I look back at these
case studies and the conclusions I drew from them, I can see a gap in
my understanding filled by the body of research that has come to be
known as New Literacy Studies (NLS). The only author associated with
NLS I had read as I was completing my research was Shirley Brice
Heath, whose study in Ways with Words of literacy
in three Carolina Piedmont communities strongly influenced not only
my thinking about literacy development but also my decision to embark
on a qualitative inquiry of my own. But it was my later discovery of
Gee’s theory of literacy as secondary discourse, built on the
primary “mother tongue” that gave me a more firmly rooted,
linguistic basis for the dialectical-material approach to writing
that I was pursuing.

The
first crucial aspect for me of Gee’s definition of discourse is his
description of it as “an ‘identity kit’ which comes complete
with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act and talk
so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize”
(21). The second is his clear articulation of the difference between
acquisition and learning in the process of coming to control a
discourse; that is, we become expert writers through
acquisition—repeated, self-motivated practice—in naturalistic
settings. Yet I might not have integrated that knowledge into my
teaching and research without Shannon’s imaginative application of
NLS to the classroom described in The Way Literacy Lives. By
tapping into students’ expertise in vernacular discourses outside
school from computer coding and quilting to creating Anime, and
inviting them to explore the rules of discourse with which literate
subjects participate and gain recognition in that community of
practice, Shannon bridges the gap between the discursive expertise
students bring to the classroom and the academic discourses they must
acquire in order as Bartholomae famously put it, to “invent the
university.”

The
idea of “rhetorical dexterity” can also be understood in terms of
Lev Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development and the correction to
it, according to Luis S. Villacañas de Castro, made by Paulo
Freire’s articulation of critical consciousness or
“conscientizacao”
(109). In this sense, rhetorical dexterity expresses the dialectic of
vernacular and academic discourses in relation to what Villacañas de
Castro calls “the pedagogy of Erscheinungsformen”
(110). In an important contribution to our understanding of critical
pedagogy, Villacañas de Castro traces Vygotsky’s theory of
education to Marx’s concept of Erscheinungsformen,
or “phenomenal forms,” arguing that Vygotsky’s inattention to
the phenomenal forms—the “final pattern of economic relations as
seen on the surface” (Marx qtd. in Villacañas de Castro
96)—diminished the impact of his theories of tool and sign use on
actual classroom instruction. Villacañas de Castro shows how
Vygotsky applies the Marxist anthropological thesis that use of tools
distinguishes humans from animals to concepts of signs and mediation
in learning “on the phylogenetic, sociocultural, and ontogenetic
planes but not adequately at the microgenetic level—the site of
instruction.

Because
Vygotsky failed to attend sufficiently to the material conditions
that arise as a result of the fundamental “epistemological dynamic
that creates a complex dialectic between the subject and the object
of inquiry” (Villacañas de Castro107), he does not address the
tension between the learners’ phenomenal reality and scientific
concepts. It is this problem that Freire and his followers take up in their
emphasis on the importance of student-teacher dialogue and that accounts
for how knowledge is shaped and potentially deformed by
Erscheinungsformen. Villacañas de
Castro’s’ insightful critique of Vygotsky both confirms the
emphasis in my research on the material conditions of education and
explains Joe’s highly developed consciousness in terms of his
ability—perhaps fostered by science fiction critiques of existing
social realities—to extricate himself from the distortions of the
phenomenal forms of a racist, exclusionary society and understand his
subjective experience from an objective standpoint. As Gee
would say, Joe demonstrated his ability to stand outside a discourse in
order to criticize it. The role of the teacher is to grasp this same
dialectic between the surface forms of reality and “‘the
concealed essential pattern’ of any phenomenon” (Villacañas
de Castro 103).

Shannon on Theory

Coming
at it about a decade after Deborah published her work, my own work
was deeply influenced by three theoretical traditions: New Literacy
Studies (NLS), critical literacy, and activity theory. I was strongly
influenced by NLS, especially studies by Gee, Heath, and Brian V.
Street, and made extensive use of Street’s notion of the
“autonomous model of literacy” (to represent school-based
literacy like standardized tests) in contrast to an “ideological
model of literacy” (to represent out-of-school literacies). That
juxtaposition formed the basic structure for my book, where I took
the ubiquity of the “autonomous model” as a starting point for
the difficulties experienced by students called basic writers. An
ideological model of literacy, by contrast, was the model I argued
students needed to understand in order to navigate the various
literacy and linguistic codes making up academic discourse.

Like
Deborah’s study and other work in BW that most inspired my
research, critical literacy deeply informed my position at multiple
levels. I was—and remain—convinced that “the point of
composition instruction,” as Deborah Mutnick insists, “…
is
to equip students with literacy skills along with a
critical-historical perspective on reading and writing in school,
work, and everyday life” (xii) by teaching them, in Freire’s
words, to “read the word and the world.” Thus, after offering a
detailed portrait of the local conditions limiting and shaping our
basic writing program—especially with respect to the culture of
standardized testing in Texas—I dedicate a chapter to critical
literacy in BW instruction, including a detailed study of an
assignment sequence I designed for our BW program informed via an
explicitly critical framework (see Chapter 3, The Way
Literacy Liberates). “When we are critically literate,”
Ira Shor explains, “we examine our ongoing development, to reveal the
subjective positions from which we make sense of the world and act in
it” (4). Vital as this seems to me, the problem I tried to capture
through deep analysis of student writing was how can we “grade”
on scales of oppression and liberation. To illustrate, I offer an
extended case study of Ana, a blind immigrant student from Mexico
whose writing reveals a great deal of insight into her position in
the world and the material realities that complicated her everyday
life yet failed to challenge the systemic oppression embedded in
literacy learning itself. For Ana, literacy learning would always be
approached as an inherent good. In a course built upon the tenets of
critical pedagogy, had Ana then met all the course objectives? I
remain unsure.

These
complexities with respect to critical literacy led me to NLS and
activity theory. Although I maintain a deep connection to the tenets
of critical theorists who insist on the social nature of literacy,
where “learning to read and write is part of the process of
becoming conscious of one’s experience as historically constructed
within specific power relations” (Anderson and Irvine 82), I wanted
to focus more on the acts
of writing and reading. This led me to NLS, with its emphasis on an
ideological model of literacy that is people-oriented,
context-specific, and fluid in opposition to an autonomous model,
which treats literacy as a “bundle of skills” (Resnick)
independent of the literacy context involved. To drill more deeply
into this concept, I found activity theory to be crucially important.

Activity
theory, rooted in Vygotskian psychology, is largely concerned with
human practice as an “activity system.” David Russell is the
first to apply activity theory to the human practice of writing,
treating literacy as an activity system. Activity theory enabled me
to hone in on why (and how) literacy is irreducible to an autonomous
skill-set or to a particular content. The input, output, and tools
used in each literacy scene are deeply dependent upon the system
engaged by a given literate activity. For example, the input, output,
and tools used for a standardized test in a timed writing environment
like the SAT differ substantially from the input, output, and tools
involved with writing an application for a job as a cashier while
standing at the customer service desk of a crowded supermarket. Taken
together, NLS, critical literacy, and activity theory enabled me to
“make explicit . . . the ubiquity of autonomous models of literacy”
and “promote . . . a more context-based understanding of the
multiple literacies available to writers—a more realistic picture
of the way literacy lives” (Carter 16).

Case Studies: Now

Deborah on Joe

Last
year, nearly twenty years after the publication of my book, I decided
to try to locate Joe. I found the loose-leaf notebook with all my
transcriptions and notations in my basement, but there was no contact
information for Joe Baxter. I called the assistant dean, still
working at LIU, who had administered the extension program Joe
attended; he gave me a street address but no phone number. I entered
it into my address book. I looked for a phone number but found none.
For months, I did nothing. Finally, during winter break, I wrote Joe
a letter. No answer. No returned envelope stamped “not at this
address.” Then, one Friday afternoon in mid-March, I drove to the
address, 84 Eldert Street, on the border of Bedford Stuyvesant and
Bushwick, after getting directions on Google. The neighborhoods I was
passing through were dilapidated, with boarded up buildings and soup
kitchens, an adjacent but very different world than the “renaissance”
in downtown Brooklyn where the university is located. Here was a
Brooklyn I did not know well; even the street names were foreign. I
had gone through the mirror into Joe Baxter’s world, a world still
marked by poverty, isolation, and a gritty urban desolation nothing
like the 21st
century metropolis I literally see developing daily out my office
window on Flatbush Avenue with its newly tree-lined streets and
towering luxury apartment buildings.

Back
in the 1990s, LIU’s now defunct extension campuses in East New
York, Bushwick, and other low-income neighborhoods offered students
like Joe access to higher education that had dramatically expanded
starting with Open Admissions in the late 1960s. That access had
already begun to close, however, while Joe was an LIU student with a
confluence of forces inside and outside the academy. In 1992, one of
basic writing’s leading theorists David Bartholomae gave his famous
“Tidy House” speech at the Conference on Basic Writing, arguing
that BW programs had become merely “expressions of our desire to
produce basic writers” (8). By the end of that decade, in 1999, New
York City Mayor Rudolf Giuliani succeeded in his push to end open
admissions at CUNY. While space does not permit me to rehearse the
debate over the place of basic writing in higher education here, I do
want to survey the geography of access to the social, cultural, and
material goods of American society.

I
could not find Joe Baxter nor would I presume to invent a life for
him beyond the one already represented in my book. Based on what I
learned about him in 1992—as Bartholomae was pronouncing basic
writing’s death as a “provisional, contested term”—what
I can do is list some statistics about African American men who fit his
profile to help us imagine what Joe might have encountered. The black
poverty rate in the U.S. is 29.1% compared to the rate for white
families of 15.9%. Black men’s income is 67% that of white men. The
unemployment rate for African Americans remains at 13.4 percent, more
than twice that of whites, and rose as high as 33.5 percent for black
youth between the ages of 16 and 24 after the 2008 crash. The net
worth of black families is $6,100 versus $67,000 for white families.
Add to these statistics police killings of young black men, stop and
frisk, prison demographics, higher rates of disease, lower life
expectancy—and Joe’s prospects look bleak.

Shannon on Eric

Unlike
Deborah, I did not have to look for Eric. He’s my brother, after
all, and we are very close. Every year, my husband and I spend
Thanksgiving at their home in Austin, and Eric and his wife often
travel together with us or visit us at our home near Dallas, about
four hours away. Insight into the state of BW, however, is available
by contrasting Eric’s position with of the story of Joe Baxter. At
the time of my study, Eric lived in a suburban area of South
Austin—in a rented two-bedroom brick home in a neighborhood of
similarly situated, mostly white and Hispanic families. Today, his
circumstances are similar. They now own a three-bedroom brick home
near a high performing elementary school. Eric still earns a good
salary as a technology specialist, and his wife is a middle school
science teacher. Unlike Joe, however, Eric is white and middle class.
Though he lacks a college degree, the privileges afforded him as a
white, middle-class male meant success for him anyway, a point I make
at some length in The Way Literacy Lives.

Access
to college-level BW in Texas, however, as in New York City, is
increasingly restricted. At the community college where Eric enrolled
in BW in 1991, for example, students can no longer receive financial
aid for “remedial” courses. Many universities no longer offer BW
at all, relegating students who may previously have gone to college
to adult literacy programs. Access to BW does not, of course, mean
access to a college degree. However, lack of access to such programs
may mean students unable to meet minimum “standards” on
traditional literacy measures (like standardized tests) will have no
access to college courses, which, in turn, means no degree. In Texas
today, the college graduation rate for white students is 31% versus
11% for African Americans.{5} Many
factors contribute to this discrepancy, including inappropriate
literacy measures and unequal access to adequate K-12 educational
opportunities.

Deborah on Methodology

Were
I to replicate the study I did in the 1990s, I would incorporate
questions about expertise in secondary discourses along the lines
Shannon suggests and Kevin Roozen so deftly achieves in his
longitudinal study of his student Charles’ extra-curricular
literate activities of stand-up comedy, self-sponsored poetry, and
sports writing. I would theorize more deeply the literacies Joe
Baxter practiced from “playing the dozens” to writing science
fiction. Most interesting to me now, I would investigate the
dialectic between form and meaning in light of Marx’s account of
the Erscheinungsformen
to try and grasp the process by which Joe acquired such a high degree
of critical literacy in an environment that leaves many individuals,
including his friend Peanut and other students in my study, incapable
of understanding or freeing themselves from the historical and
economic forces—the phenomenal forms—that shape them.

I
would devise a methodology to discern the process by which
individuals do or do not come to understand the relationship between
themselves and the object of study. As Villacañas de Castro puts it:
“…at the core of the phenomenal forms there is a concern for the
interferences that obstruct a learning process when the scientific
observer wants to understand the same object s/he forms part of”
(95-6). According to NLS, the two major moves the individual makes in
acquiring secondary discourses are self-motivated practice in natural
settings and the development of critical consciousness in order to
step outside the discourse and critique it. This theory of literacy
resonates powerfully with the pedagogy of Erscheinungsformen in
its recognition of
the epistemological problem of the relationship between the observer
and the observed. One tendency in literacy studies has been to defend
the non-literate or illiterate against the “violence of literacy”
(Stuckey 1990). However, this perspective simply privileges the
phenomenal forms without understanding the effects of oppression on
individuals’ consciousness and “the fact that the place they
occupy in a given social milieu vis-à-vis the means of production
conditions their ability to reach an appropriate representation…of
the social phenomenon that surround them, and of which they form
part” (Villacañas de Castro 94).

Shannon on Methodology

Were
I to replicate the study I did nearly a decade ago, I would also want
to offer a more in-depth study of extracurricular literacy. Equally
important, I feel, would be some inclusion of adult literacy
programs, since so many students barred from college altogether
(those who may have been in BW courses before) end up there today, as
more and more doors to college via BW programs across the country
close. I would also want to offer a richer, more extensive analysis
of the local factors limiting and shaping writing instruction and
writing assessment. My earlier work dealt with these material
conditions to some extent, especially with respect to standardized
testing in Texas. However, I am increasingly convinced that the
institutional and community histories and histories of our various writing
programs may have a significant impact on the work possible in any
given classroom.

Basic Writing Studies: Today

Ironically,
the future of BW studies looks brighter today than that of actually
existing BW programs. When Deborah published her study in 1996,
access to higher education was just beginning to narrow as New York
City Mayor Rudy Giuliani called for higher standards at CUNY’s
four-year colleges in what would be the opening salvo in an ongoing,
heated, national debate about the role of college-level remediation.
By the time Shannon published her study in 2008, many colleges had
systematically begun to dismantle BW programs through legislation at
state and federal levels. Most emblematic of the conservative
backlash against open access for those of us in composition studies
was the destruction of the seminal program Mina Shaughnessy had
created at CUNY just a few decades earlier. While some popular
reforms like Peter Adams’ Accelerated Learning Program appear to
have improved BW student outcomes, many state legislatures have
simply cut or severely reduced remediation at four-year colleges.

Of
course, such threats to BW are hardly new. A
Symposium from the May 1957 issue of CCC,
for example, asks “Has English Zero Seen Its Day?” At that point
at least, the answer was a resounding “yes,” calling attention to
the many universities that already had or would soon be dropping
BW—then called “English Zero”—including the University of
Illinois and Purdue. They further reveal that, “no institution
which has not offered English Zero plans to introduce it.” Indeed,
they continue, “the potential English freshman who finds college
doors gradually closing against him will assuredly enroll
somewhere—but where?”
(545, emphasis added). Sound familiar? Today many are relegated to
community colleges, which are often so overenrolled and underfunded
they are no longer open access. Meanwhile, at CUNY, where the
student-led movement for open admissions began, such reforms have led
to a dramatic decrease in the number of black and Latino/a students
at its senior colleges, with the percentage of black students at
Hunter College, for example, falling from 20 percent in 2001 to 9
percent in 2013 (Enrollment Trends).

Although
the state of BW programs seems bleaker than ever, scholarship in BW
appears to be thriving, in large part because the draconian cuts have
mobilized scholars and teachers in defense of the students BW
historically served. Indeed, it is far more visible today in the
larger field of composition outside BW circles than it has been for
many years. At the 2013 Conference on College Composition and
Communication (CCCC), for example, in his 500-word call for papers,
chair Howard Tinberg mentions “Basic Writing” eight
times and brings back the area cluster for “Basic Writing” after
many years’ absence. The prestigious “Exemplar” Award for CCCC
2013 went to Mike Rose, a renowned figure in BW, and at least one
“Featured Panel” was devoted to the topic of basic writing. BW’s
place in the larger scholarly conversation has also been reinforced
in our field’s major publications. Especially exciting to us are
the growing number of book-length studies of BW’s long and complex
history, each challenging understandings of BW as monolithic in new
and provocative ways. Studies of BW at Harvard and Yale in the early
1900s (Ritter), equal educational programs at University of Wisconsin
in the 1970s (Lamos), and other, related investigations of BW at
Berkeley (Stanley) and City College of New York (Soliday) reveal
significant ways in which BW has historically been defined not by
student need but by local conditions.

We
are inspired by the ways recent innovations and publications have
taken on increasingly complex and important issues in BW, but we are
also deeply concerned about trends in both K-12 and higher education
that are diminishing educational opportunities, particularly for
black and Latino/a working class students. In our own work since
publishing the BW studies reflected upon here, we remain interested
in relationships between literacy and power. We continue to be
informed by many of the same theories that drove our earlier work,
including critical literacy and NLS. Today, however, our current
research concerns relationships between literacy and power as
manifested outside the classroom and over time. While we see our
current work as more firmly rooted in subfields like community
literacy and public rhetoric than BW per se, we believe it has
many implications for literacy instruction in academic
spaces—including BW. The most visible example of this recent work
is the Writing Democracy project.

Concluding Remarks

The
project we have collaborated on most closely together over the past
five years is Writing Democracy
(http://writingdemocracy.wordpress.com),
an attempt to create a national network of university-community
partnerships modeled after the 1930s Federal Writers’
Project.{6}
We conclude this retrospective by articulating the relationship we
see between Writing Democracy (WD) and our research on basic writing.
The distinction NLS makes between autonomous and ideological models
of literacy parallels our move from the narrower study of basic
writing students aimed at improving instruction to the broader
investigation of writing in communities. This more expanded scope of
research and action is in direct response to neoliberal capitalism’s
intensifying contradictions, which we see as reaffirming autonomous
models of education and exacerbating class stratification in schools.
While we continue to teach in traditional classroom settings, we are
eager to foster “writing beyond the curriculum” (Parks and
Goldblatt 2000) in ways that support academic outsiders—both
individuals like Joe who live in segregated, impoverished
neighborhoods, and those like Eric whose needs cannot be
humanely addressed and whose capacities go unrecognized in a system
driven by standardized testing and dominant cultural models of
literacy.

Through
university-community partnerships—and the creation of a national or
even international network of writers, teachers, students,
journalists, and other contributors working to write a new cultural
roadmap for the 21st
century{7}—we
are beginning to redefine our own research priorities. We aim to
involve our students and the communities surrounding our campuses in
the documentation of everyday life and language through personal
stories, oral histories, archival research, and ethnographies. Like
the state guides produced by the FWP, we imagine a retelling of
history that documents diverse social realities and widespread
conditions from income inequality and police brutality to deportation
and government surveillance along with creating a space for nurturing
and promoting community spokespeople, artists, writers, and
activists. Inspired by emerging social movements like the Arab
Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and #blacklivesmatter, we call for a
“political turn” that investigates the socioeconomic structures
that produce racism, sexism, economic inequality, and environmental
degradation, on the one hand, and obscene wealth, privilege, and
abuses of power, on the other. We imagine composition instruction
engaging students in collaborative, literate activities in
naturalistic settings in which they could write for communities, work
with faculty on research projects, conduct their own inquiries, and
contribute to the creation of a record of our times.

With
such a network, we could truly value the literate skills and
knowledge that students bring with them; and for those who lack such
a repertoire, we would create conditions in which they could acquire
it. Thus we aim to continue the work we began in our studies of basic
writing in the larger contexts of social history and political
economy through close investigations of learning vis-à-vis the
Erscheinungsformen.
In so doing, we respond not only to oppressive social conditions but
also to the abiding epistemological problem that occurs “when the
scientific observer wants to understand the same object s/he forms
part of” (Villacañas 96).

Notes

Joe’s writing is reproduced verbatim with grammatical and punctuation errors including hyphenation in which the hyphen is consistently placed at the left margin on the line below the hyphenated word. (Return to text.)

“To write is to find words that explain what can be seen from an angle of vision, the limitations of which determine a wide or narrow bias, but not the lack of one” (Brodkey 546). (Return to text.)

I directed our First-Year Writing Program from 2007-2010, creating a related textbook for our FYC program that combined ethnographic inquiry with literacy studies to guide the development of rhetorical dexterity with more extensive research and writing. In that time, we went through two editions of Literacies in Context (2007; 2008). In 2010, Tabetha Adkins took over as WPA—so I could dedicate more of my time to the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC), which I co-founded with Donna in 2007 (http://convergingliteraciescenter.wordpress.com). As WPA, Tabetha continues to develop curricula that combine ethnographic inquiry with a Writing About Writing approach. (Return to text.)

To create a five-minute video essay about Eric’s literacy experiences called “Standardized,” I edited and remixed these same recordings with home movies and public domain footage from the Internet Archive. My objective with this video, as with my book, was to represent tensions between the automatous literacy model and an ideological model. The soundtrack for this project was Eric’s own original music, primarily his song “Crushed by Velvet,” which articulates his own struggles with severe dyslexia, especially with respect to writing. View this brief video at YouTube (http://tinyurl.com/ntlqt6r). (Return to text.)

For more about FWP as it relates to Writing Democracy (and, by extension, our field), see “Notes on a Federal Writer’s Project for the 21st Century” (Carter and Mutnick), “Rediscovering America: The FWP Legacy and Challenge” (Hirsch), and Toward a Twenty-First Century Federal Writers’ Project” (Mutnick). (Return to text.)